Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu says his government will be collaborating with private players to transform the state’s education sector in line with the T.H.E.M.E.S agenda of his administration.
He said it was necessary for the private sector to uphold the structures laid out by the government for the advancement of education, saying that the government alone cannot do it.
Sanwo-Olu stated this during a public-private partnership dialogue at the Eko Hotels and Suites organised by the state ministry of education with the theme “creating a better future through education.”
He said the increase in the annual budgetary allocation to education from N65 billion in the previous year to N135 billion in 2020 was a demonstration of administration’s commitment to raise the quality of delivery in the sector.
“The questions today are what should we be teaching, who should design the curriculum, who should we include in the policy, where should we do the teaching? How do we manage the outcome, how do we assess pupils and how do we collaborate? Finally, how do we pay for all of these?
The said answers to these posers were germane because the government could not do it alone.
That’s why we have called ourselves here today,” he said.
Sanwo-Olu assured that his administration would continue to strengthen partnership with stakeholders and scale up capacity of the educational system through technology, infrastructure development in schools, among others to guarantee a better future for the children.
He recounted some of the successes his administration has recorded in the ministry in less than a year of piloting the affairs of the state and reiterated that he will continue to ensure that teaching becomes a competitive discipline in Lagos, saying that it was possible to pass world class knowledge to pupils.
“We’ve commissioned to build a total of about 60,000 chairs and tables and we’re hoping that we’ll wrap it up to about 100,000 before the end of the year.
“We’re pushing infrastructure in about 300 schools this year. We started with the first set of about 60. We have also set up a whole unit which we call School Rehabilitation and Infrastructure Development just to face school rehabilitation and development and we’re working with the ministry on that,” he said.
JOSHUA BASSEY
